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2019/02/10 Hiking around Herdecke!

So the hiking season is almost coming back now. With a few destinations in mind, I was looking at the calendars of availability at some youth hostels. And one of them, at Cochem, turned out to have exactly one weekend (March 30) in the coming few months available. That's the last day of winter time, which means we'll have one hour less on the 31. Besides I'll be having a conference starting on April 1. Still, since it's been quite some time that we wanted to go to Cochem, I didn't want to miss this opportunity and quickly made a reservation for 20 people. On Wednesday, I put it online. Within 24 hours, all the 20 spots were filled. I remember that our last weekend trip to Trier was not quite popular and we could not find 20 people till the end, so I was unable to believe what just happened this time. Anyway there's a good mixture of all the nationalities, although there are 16 boys and only 4 girls. Well, I'm pretty sure that this is going to change anyway.

2019/01/01 Iran over Christmas vacation

Happy new year everyone! I hope you all had good holidays. As you might already know, I was in Iran. Yes, Iran. Yes, it's not quite the country that everyone visits over Christmas. There were a few reasons that I wanted to go there now.

Exactly 6 years ago, I was also in Iran (cf. this article). At that time, I was essentially spending the winter there in order to continue cycling towards Central Asia. My greatest luck in that moment was meeting Shadi, who happened to use couch surfing for the first time there. Even though Shadi moved to Sweden, there were still (only a few...) family members in Tehran. Especially Madarbozorg (grandma) was still there. It was already a sufficient reason for me to go back to Tehran. At the same time, I also did not want to stay in Europe during the Christmas vacation, as it is cold, there's no one, dark, everything is closed etc. And visiting a place like Morocco or Thailand is the worst idea, because you'll see tons of German tourists in those areas. Tehran was a perfect place which did not have Christmas and doesn't have a high season either.

Growing mushrooms with coffee grounds

The story began at my 30th birthday. I got a mushroom kit as a present, which was just a box filled with straw. According to its instructions, I was just supposed to spray once or twice a day so that the mushrooms can simply come out from the box and they can be harvested at some point. The first one came out, but I somehow didn't really harvest it. It dried out very quickly. After removing it, nothing really came out, but I didn't really try to figure out what was the problem, probably because I knew that this mushroom kit was designed to be used once and not quite like plants where you can give water and nutrients and they grow forever.

Still my interest grew and I wanted to know if there was a possibility of growing mushrooms myself, also because before getting this mushroom kit, I knew essentially nothing about growing mushrooms, except for this one thing that what we call mushroom is the waste product of what the bacteria eat in the soil/wood/straw etc.